Page 365
From
Naked SpacesLiving Is Round
(1985).
assumption has been that anything that's dark is not worth looking at. At most, darkness is a context for romance and for danger. Even in a documentary, we'd either never see the types of dimly lit spaces you reveal, or they'd be lit artificially, which would allow the technology to record them, but in a way that would distort the real experience of such spaces. The technology determines what one can see about other cultures. You depart from this not only by recording indoor spaces in their own natural low-light conditions, but by revealing the beauty of these spaces.
Trinh:
You can imagine these houses being shot with a light inside. The quality of solid darkness and the shafts of light that penetrate the inside spaces would totally be damaged.
MacDonald:
Instead of intimateif that's the right wordthe spaces would become bare, empty.
Trinh:
Yes, yes. The question of cinema and light is pivotal in
Naked Spaces
. Dwelling is both material and immaterial; it invites volume and shape, and it reflects a cosmology and a way of living creatively. In other words, to deal with architecture is to deal with the notion of light in space. To deal with the notion of light in space is to deal with color, and to deal with color is to deal with music, because the question of light in film is also a question of timing and rhythm. Such mutual accord of elements of daily existence is particularly striking in the built environments filmed and the way these materialize the multiple oneness of life.